Friday, January 13, 2023

  Friday, January 13, 2023

  I only realized today was Friday the thirteenth when I typed in the date. Well, so far, it's been okay.   I got up shortly before eight. My alarm went off at 5:30, as usual. I had no reason to get out of bed except for Elsa. Eventually, I was going to have to feed her.

   Regarding her other needs, she had no objection to using my lanai carpet to do her business. I did my in-bed exercises and dozed for the next two to three hours. Sleeping in is exhausting. I woke up tired. 

    I ran into some people I usually see at an earlier time. I thought Michelle had been out since before seven. She walks for a long time. Then, I ran into a couple with their dog who lived on the street below me. I remembered their dog's name was Kai and the woman's, Pam. Oops! The dog's name was Mia, and the woman's was Annie. Getting the dog's name wrong was forgivable. I cued myself, remembering she had the same name as someone's child. Wrong child. Wrong sex, for that matter. Kai is a boy; Mia is a girl. Getting the names  Kai and Mia confused was one thing, but renaming this poor woman was another. I know names start slipping at this age. As I lay in bed this morning, I tried to remember the name of a philosopher my dad had told me about. I couldn't remember it for the life of me. As I typed now, it came back to me, Kierkegaard.

   I ran into a neighbor who lives kitty-corner from me across my backyard, John. He was on his second dog walk for the morning with Bobo, their seventeen-year-old miniature poodle. John's first walk is with his two yellow labs. They tear around the block.

   I got my entry for the public blog edited and posted before nine am. At nine-thirty, I signed in for a Zoom meeting with Jana, a woman who asked me to mentor her as a reading teacher. We talk about our lives as well. It is nice to have someone who consistently expresses an interest in my ideas. She had double booked for today. It is usually me who does that. It was just as well. I was exhausted. I tried to nap before my eleven am appointment with Shelly.

   In my session with Shelly, I worked on the relationship between hate and anger. I saw it on a continuum for the first time today. Shelly said she thought they came from different parts of the brain. That's certainly possible. Hate probably resides in a deeper part of the brain. Brain scans show that we never use discreet parts of the brain. There are many parts involved in all activities. I imagine hatred is our response when we don't get what we want. We only recognize it as anger. But we often hear people say, 'I could have killed him," not meaning it. I'm sure we don't, but why do we say that? I believe those expressions carry some hidden meaning, not about our intentions but what happens in our unconscious minds. We can deal with being angry. We can't deal with wanting to kill people because they don't do it our way.

   I also dealt with cravings. I have ignored its role in my life except for chocolate and FreeCell. But there are many things I crave. I crave better relationships with certain people in my life. I crave the warmth and affection I shared with Mike. I crave recognition for my work. Moreover, I crave to see people use it more. I also crave recognition as the creator of the method I developed, but only at a polite distance.

   D's mom missed my text from Wednesday. D said he wanted to work on reading the book three days a week. I had yet to hear from her about adding Friday to our schedule. I texted her again this morning. She said yes.

   We continued reading Investing for Young Adults. He had done no reading on his own. He doesn't. I couldn't convince him to make an effort. I can only push so hard. I repeat over and over that the more he does, the better he'll get. But nothing penetrates. He forgets. That I can believe. He has no memory. Really! It's stunning. Even things he wants to remember, he can't.  

    D still makes up words with little or no relationship to the letters on the page. His guesses are often good, but he makes enough errors to throw off the meaning.

   I have a lot of cases with kids with faulty memories. This is the first time I've seen it like this. Or is it just that I've never noticed it before? I hope it's the former, and I just got lucky. The other option means something's going wrong with us physically that's altering our brains. Is it genetic, epigenetic, or chemical, coming from our food, air, or water?

   I read about Wittgenstein's three-day nonstop bout with Bertrand Russell, trying to get him to see what he was trying to say when he spoke about the difference between saying and seeing. I would love to run this past Mike. He studied philosophy for both PhDs. On the other hand, if I had asked him to tell me what he knew, I might have driven him mad with how I approached the topic. It was always a problem between us. He studied what people had to say. I struggled to understand things on my own terms.  

   On seeing versus saying, the idea Wittgenstein desperately tried to get Russell to understand:  It sounds like the difference between the concrete and the abstract. Seeing is concrete; saying is abstract. In my first class in linguistics, the teacher said, "All words are abstractions."  That's taken for granted now. Was it also understood in Wittgenstein's day, or did he introduce the idea?

   Then again, seeing is limited, too. I can only see an object from one perspective at a time. What I see with my eyes is limited. I can't see the back of something simultaneously; I see the front of it. I imagine what the other side looks like. Yes, I have that information from seeing the back of the chair some other time, but at that moment, my perception of the chair was top-down. I imagine a whole chair. I can never 'see' a whole object at one glance. Isn't that image an abstraction since it only exists in my mind? It certainly doesn't involve seeing. Mike might know the answer to that question. I can feel him pushing against the confines of his current existence. He would love to lecture me on the subject, maybe in my dreams.